I use to pride myself on being up to date, but lately, I’ve started noticing more and more that I don’t really “surf” anymore. I tend to stay on specific sites or inside my RSS feeds. Well, today, I learned about PlentyOfFish.com. For those that don’t know, it’s a free dating site. Whats interesting is that the site creator was pretty much the single employee, single coder, single everything until very recently when he hired his second employee. It gets really interesting to know how he started the site.
Markus Frind (Blog) started out in the Web bubble bust by deciding to switch from ASP to ASP.Net while hopping jobs during the downturn of the bubble. He would code in the evening since he’s more of a “learn as I go” programmer (like myself) and started hosting from his home computer and internet connection. After he saturated his DSL line, he decided to upgrade and thats the crazy part. Around this time, AdSense rolled out and he started making a few thousand dollars a month. Today, he’s making around $30,000 a day in Ad revenue from Google’s AdSense.
Oddly, while I don’t really like Microsoft’s ASP.Net, it’s the only thing PlentyOfFish uses. Markus has become a Microsoft Poster Boy by using 1 web server and several DB servers to average out around 3.5 Million page views a day. That wasn’t a typo - one IIS web server handling 3.5 million page views a day and there is no caching. The only thing Markus has recently done is to move images off his DB and server to a large caching network for him since he was finding an image farm difficult to deal with due to delays and such.
Now, one thing I particularly liked while researching his feat was when Microsoft’s Channel 9 came to visit, he admitted that he loved ASP.Net but one of his issues was that he didn’t support any of the drag’n'drop features of it. He prefers to hand code everything, even the DB layer. Check out the web cast to view the reaction and facial expressions of that little tidbit. It’s pretty funny.
“On thing I’ve found is…don’t use any built in components.” - “Oh really….”
An interesting fact is that he says all the bottlenecks are DB related. He also stated that de-normalizing your tables actually works. This makes sense on a larger site because you don’t want to use several queries on one page or have a massive JOIN statement somewhere. Another thing he states is seperate the DB’s in terms of read/write, which again, makes sense. If you write and read on the same DB, the write statements have to execute before the reads. This causes the Page file to come into play, which slows down the site. Multiply that by 3.5 million viewers, that could kill the site almost instantly.
User research, he states, is a wasted cause. He tends to implement features and watch site stats. If he implements something, he’ll watch the visit duration. If it goes up, it’s a good feature. If it falls..you get the point. His thing is, someone always complains, no matter what.
It’s really cool to see a 1 person company grow out of literally nothing to become a site that competes with companies that say they’re the largest of their kind. Heck, the following image was one I had seen and started getting me to move to an AdSense model - is actually his. I never new that… Oddly, he got this after Google’s EFT bounced…
